


what happened to the soul that you used to be?

by buckynatalia



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Ghosts, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-04-22 16:57:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 18
Words: 16,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4843187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckynatalia/pseuds/buckynatalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"As I look back at the past together with her<br/>suddenly she starts to disappear.<br/>Maybe she never really existed at all."<br/>__</p><p>Clarke moves into a new house, an old Victorian split into two apartments. It's only temporary, she tells herself, falling asleep in a cold dark room. Objects move of their own accord, she begins to hear strange voices in the night, dreams she will never wake up from.  Her upstairs neighbour, Lexa, is cold and detached and tells Clarke she's imagining things. Strange things start to happen, Clarke sees a ghost. An apparition who looks a lot like the upstairs neighbor Clarke's trying not to fall in love with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The apartment is cheap and groaning and I don’t quite feel at home. It’s an old Victorian split in two. But who cares. The rent’s cheap, and it’s only temporary. Until I can figure out a way to skip town with my oil paints and old jean shorts.

But, for now, there’s a roof over my head. There’s mice skittering in the basement and the kitchen’s clean as it ever will be. I've wiped everything down, hastily scrubbed the flat with lemon cleaner and bleach. In the bedroom sits my old wooden bedframe from home. It still has _Clarke_ scrawled in middle-school penmanship on one of the legs.

The whole flat is hotboxed with the smoke of cheap incense. It worms its way into my head and stays, defiant.

“Home sweet home,” I sighed, shoving open a window. The treetops are just starting to turn a dim burnt orange, like candlelight. I breathe in the crisp cold air, the dizziness wearing away. Maybe winter will be a long time coming. Maybe the house won’t be as lonely as it feels, now.

  I stand in the dim linoleum kitchen, with it’s faded motif of cornflowers along the ceiling, feeling just a little lost. The cabinets are creaky, one fallen completely off it’s hinges. In the next room, there’s a veritable mountain of boxes. None of them are unpacked.

On the table sits a meager supply of pots and pans. On the counter is a full head of kale that my mother sent me. Will not be eaten. A brown paper bag that Raven and Bellamy had left, filled to the brim with Doritos and booze and chocolate. _Sorry we couldn’t be there!_ The note read.

This would definitely be eaten.

There was an upstairs neighbor, too. She was nice, I suppose, if a little detached. The two of us had never talked, granted, but she’d thrown me a half-smile once. Upstairs Neighbor wasn’t exactly bad, either. There was no obnoxious trap music filtering through the floor, no creaky bedsprings, no loud visitors.

So I should be happy. I should be grateful that I’m moved out of my claustrophobic childhood townhouse, with my sad-eyed mother and basement full of my father’s old things. I’m a big girl now, aren’t I?

I eat a small meal of microwave mac n’ cheese, bruised cherry tomatoes, and the cheap pink wine Bellamy bought. The mac n cheese tastes distinctly fake, and the pink wine leaves a sour taste on my tongue. Outside the window, it’s dead quiet. Leaves blow across the dark yard, spiders skitter across the ceiling. It’s the time of the year that things begin to seek shelter, to rot.

I throw my dishes into the sink, scraped clean. My stomach’s warm and full. A moth buzzes around the kitchen light, doomed to die a meaningless death, and I pull a chocolate bar from the bag. It has little flecks of toffee in it.

I wander down the hall and wash off what’s left of my eyeliner. My face is red and cold when I’m done, bright spots of pink high on my cheekbones. I pull the last of the bobby pins from my hair, knowing I’ll lose every single one in a matter of days. My bedroom door creaks when I open it, and I trip over a box. I pull on an oversize t-shirt and slump into bed.

Sleep comes fast and hits me like a train. My dreams are full of huge fields and empty skies, funerals and apocalyptic rain storms. And at the end of it all, there’s a beautiful woman clothed all in white. There’s blood on my hands. She tells me there’s nothing to be afraid of.

\- - - - - - - -

I wake hours later, and the sky’s deathly black. My mouth tastes of chalk, my arms limp and sore. Far away, I can hear someone weeping, the heaving sound of the sobs echoing somewhere outside the window. It’s unearthly and strange, sending a shiver up my spine.

The sobs dissolve into screams. Screams of grief that penetrate my ribcage and stay there, trembling.

I walk to the window, my sore limbs protesting. I pull aside the curtains and look out to the yard, gray and half-frozen, dead leaves carpeting the entirety of it. My breath fogs up the glass. My breath hitches in my chest.

Outside, a girl is kneeling on the ground. The old oak tree towers over her, twisting and dark. A white dress billows around her legs, a curtain of long dark hair blurring her face. The paleness of her skin seems to blot into the ground. Looking at her, I can’t breathe.

The girl's head turns. Blank eyes staring into mine, sending an electric jolt through me.

And then she’s gone. There is no moonlight-silver dress pooling on the dark leaves. No pale skin. No violent eyes or shivering fingers.

Just me, staring out the window, head empty. Air rattles in my lungs and I return to bed, thinking of nothing but her hair in the moonlight.

 

\- - - - - - - -

 

The air is warmer in the morning, almost balmy. I’m climbing the porch stairs in my tank top and pajama pants, carrying a large package from my mother. Upstairs Neighbor stands in her doorway, with flawless skin and gray jeans. A vision in the morning, shimmering and beautiful.

“You just moved in?” she asks me, arms crossed.

“Yeah,” I say, and stick out a hand. She ignores it, her wide green eyes looking deeply into mine, like she’s looking for something. Slowly, my hand drops to my side, heavy. “My name’s Clarke."

“Lexa,” she says, her voice low and clear. Then, softly, “I hope you like it here.”

“Thanks,” I say, the package shifting in my hands. There were dark circles under her eyes, and hair fell over her forehead. Unremarkable, you’d think, but there’s something unsettling about her, a natural sort of grace.

Once, when I was small, I went to a zoo and watched a panther behind a thick wall of glass. It was so deadly, I knew, with it’s yellow eyes and sharp claws. It eyed me with boredom and a withdrawn sort of hunger. She looked at me the same way. Another time, another place, she would have been something bred to kill.

“Hey,” I say, as she starts to turn away. Lexa turns to face me. “Did you see the girl in the yard last night? White dress?”

She looks at me blankly. “A girl?”

“Underneath the oak tree . . .?”

Perhaps I’m imagining things. Lexa only shakes her head slowly.

“No, I didn’t see anything like that. Have a good day, Clarke."

Then she’s gone, just like that, letting the storm door snap shut.

Lexa threw a glance, over her shoulder, so quickly that I almost missed it. She looks me in the eye and a corner of her mouth turns up. Something like a smile, something like a promise.

 

\- - - - - - -


	2. Chapter 2

It’s noon and I’m laying on the floor of my room, attempting to unpack what used to be my wardrobe. I’m elbow-deep in soft fabric, blowing hair out of my eyes. On and on, worn flannels and loose dresses and wool socks. I hum a tune that I don’t quite know.

I’ve been here three weeks, each day lonelier than the last.

I sit and pull things out of boxes until my arms grow tired. I find an old shirt that used to be Finn’s, dark gray and frayed at the hem. If I close my eyes it smells like him, the deep musky smell like springtime and leather. My eyes burn. Don't cry, Clarke.

After an hour I get up and boil water, and the roiling waves look like something to be played with. I peel ginger and scrape the last of the gritty, dry honey from the container. They melt together and the steam settles over my face like a net. I pour the tea into a mug and take a small scalding sip, the mouthful burning all the way down. It tasted better when my father made it.

I lay in bed, my hair spread across the pillows, and stare at the cracked ceiling for what feels like hours. I cover myself in pillows and blankets, my fingertips still cold. Good thing I didn’t bother getting dressed today.

Only bad thing about laying in bed doing nothing? Your thoughts catch up to you.

I’ve hardly slept in three weeks. No thanks to the broken heater. No thanks to the creaky walls, or my dead boyfriend’s shirt in the back of my drawer, smelling of him. No thanks to the faint voices whispering in my ear, unclaimed, or my locked bedroom door opening in the middle of the night.

I remember a sleepover when I was ten, sitting in an overhumid pink bedroom, a jumble of little girls gathered around a wide flat Ouija board. There was a heart-shaped glass piece and one girl with pink lipgloss kept asking if her crush liked her. Once I put my fingers on the piece and let my then-friends nudge it around as they pleased.

Ouija boards seemed like such a forbidden thing, back then, something dangerous. Communicating with the spirit world, or whatever, anything to bring some thrill to our monotonous lives. I wondered why a tortured, undead soul would help a group of giggling schoolgirls.

“Stop being stupid,” I mutter to myself. Ghosts were for shitty horror movies and a quick Halloween costume. Nothing to be believed in, let alone afraid of. My house was drafty and old.

My socks weren’t matching. My ginger tea’s gone cold.

Next to me, my phone buzzed. _Incoming call. Raven Reyes._

“Hi, Raven,” I said, and my voice sounded thinner than it should have.

“Hey, Clarke,” said Raven, happier than I’d heard her in a long while. Her melancholy could move mountains, her happiness could clear the sky of clouds. She suffered so quietly, sometimes. Not today, though, not today. “How’re you doing?”

Lonely. Slightly afraid. Chilled to the bone.

“Good,” I said immediately, the knee-jerk response. A lie, it would seem. “It takes some getting used to, living alone. But the new house is nice. Has character.”

“God, you sound like your mom,” said Raven drily.

“I do not,” I said offhandedly, setting my cold tea on the floor. For a moment it feels like she’s a little closer. “Thank you guys for the doritos and booze, though.”

“No problem. I’m glad you’re moved out, is all.”

“Yeah, me too. How’ about you? How’s San Diego?”

“Hot as hellfire,” she says after a beat, letting out a breath. “Especially at the auto shop, changing oil all day gets sweaty real quick. Our apartment is tiny and doesn’t have airconditioning, but the beach is within walking distance. . .” Raven’s voice dips down a bit lower, softer than I’ve heard it in a long while. “I think things are looking up, Clarke. We’re saving up to start our own business, you know? I think things will get better."

“They will,” I said, an empty promise. Something in my heart is creaky and unanchored. 

There’s a long pause, a truck trundling by on her end of the line. Then a deep breath.

“We miss you,” she said. Took a long time for her to open up, like that.

“I miss you too,” I replied.

“I gotta go. Stay safe, okay?” Raven laughs. “Don’t watch any horror movies.”

She hangs up, leaving me underneath a pile of blankets.

My phone dies a few minutes later, sitting on my bedstand.

I can’t find a charger.

____

 

Someone knocks on my bedroom door, three tentative, staccato notes.

I move to answer it, my socks slipping on the wooden floors.

“Hello?” I said to the empty hallway. The air was very, very still.

In the hallway sat three things.

1\. My battered iPhone, devoid of battery. There’s a new fissure down the middle of the screen.  
2\. Finn’s old gray t-shirt, soaked through with some liquid that smells strongly of  
3\. Ginger tea, the yellow ceramic mug split cleanly in half.

I suppose I’ll have to wash it now, to rid the cloth of sticky-sweet. It won’t smell like him anymore.

I stand there staring at the three objects for a very long time, even as the pool of tea soaks my phone in honey liquid. It’s gone now. Finn’s been cremated, ashes in the wind, and Raven’s sweating out the last of her grief. It’s time for me to wash the sticky-sweet from my fingers, too.

Behind me, my bedroom door slams shut. 

 

______


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "but in our story,  
> who is the monster at the end of the book?  
> oh my love, the monster is time."

______

 

Weeks passed. I slept on the couch, telling myself there was nothing to be afraid of. This paranoia happened to everyone moving into a new house, didn’t it? This was commonplace. My overactive artist’s brain, fabricating things, overheating.

I boiled pasta for supper, dishing it up with cheese and tomatoes. The steam settles on my face, on my arms. I shoved open my kitchen window and took a deep breath of the sharp air outside. The sun had set a long time ago.

It was eight at night, and Lexa was leaning out of her window, gazing at the horizon as if she were searching for something. And I looked up at her from my windowsill, feeling small and unsteady. A bird sung, far away. Something in my ribcage fluttered.

“Lexa!” I called from my window. “Do you want to come down for dinner? There's enough for two. . ."

“I already ate,” she said, then paused, considering. "I'd love to come down."

Two minutes later, she showed up on my doorstep with messy hair and moonlight-colored skin. Her boots were silent on my floor, someone practiced in being ignored, and sat down without a word. It was a little awkward, having a complete stranger watch me eat spaghetti, ask me about my childhood and my favorite books. Ask me why I chose the things I did. Ask me which dreams I’ve forgotten.

Lexa was quiet and still, looked me in the eye. When she finally talked to me, she meant it. There were rings on her fingers and a necklace around her throat.

I took a bite. “So, I’ve heard some weird stuff around the house.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. Like I wasn’t scared out of my mind. "Stuff moving when I haven’t touched it. Voices. Doors slamming. You seen anything like that? Ghosts?”

Lexa shook her head. “There’s no ghosts in this house, Clarke. Just dust and memories . . . “ Her hand touched mine. Tenderly, hesitantly. Cold fingers with long nails at the ends. She cared. My heart rattled, once more. “Don’t worry yourself, okay?”

Up close, she was more beautiful, endlessly fascinating. Sharp cheekbones and a cut on her chin. Hers was the kind of face that inspired poetry and indie movies, oil paintings and bloody wars. “I won’t,” I said, and it tasted like a lie.

She stayed for another hour, tapping her foot, laughing whenever I told a joke. Leaves blew outside, tea boiled on the stove, and inside it was warm and it felt like the loneliness might never return. 

When Lexa left, I pulled her into a hug. She smelled like rain and cotton. Her arms were strong and her smile sweet and brief.

The door closed behind her, heavy.

I realized, then, that never learned her last name. I never learned her forgotten dreams or the title of her favorite poem. But here would be more days for us, I’m sure of it.

 

_____

 

Lexa hugged me goodnight, sometimes. Watched me eat. Smiled bittersweet.

She told me at last, what broke her heart so long ago. A cinnamon-haired girl with scars on her arms, apologies on her lips. Her name was Costia, and she had died in the springtime, weeks before the tulips began to bloom.

My days got dark again. Bitter coffee kept the demons out.

I curled under a heavy blanket, my brain not empty so much as overfull. No one’s coming to save me. There was nothing to be saved from. The windows were fogged up, tiny droplets glistening on the glass. It was chilly outside, all opaque fog and damp leaves. Autumn had set in, and the huge moon washed everything pale gray.

The broken-boned couch was walled in by unpacked boxes. Somehow it felt safer. Like when a little kid covers their eyes in a game of hide and seek. If I can’t see the monsters, they can’t see me. Right?

My eyes wouldn’t stay shut.

I got up and laced my boots up over my bare feet. I draped a sweater over my shoulders and then climbed out the kitchen window. It was a four foot drop onto a pile of dead rose bushes, and I landed knees bent, thorns piercing my yoga pants. The stars stretched overhead, white moon was huge and unsmiling, bathing everything in unearthly light. The trees were beginning to change colors and to tumble to the ground. Walking across the dead grass, I felt as if I were freezing over, too. Forever preparing for a harsh winter that would leave me breathless.

The trees came, a dark canopy, twisting black branches stretching up, up, up. I stumbled over roots. Time drifted. My mouth grew dry, and the cold settled somewhere near my collarbone. I walked on and on. There were gentle rolling hills covered in oaks. I’d run up one hill only to find a random incline, dropping sharply into a raging ravine. Small white clouds hovered in the air, moments after I exhaled.

Tonight was damp and prickly and wretched. The trees were very close, whispering things to each other, and for hours I pressed through them. I wandered away from the rattling house, away from the distant friends and the cluttered mind. Vines snaked up their trunks. A rusty metal fence, collapsed here and there, walled in a patch of weeds.

I stepped over the wrought iron, the wind running through my hair. A rabbit rustled in the bushes, and the moon slowly trekked across the sky, dragging it’s feet. There was large stones, here and there among the overgrown grass.

Graves.

One was farther than the rest, estranged. An uneasy feeling rose in my gut, unescapable and roiling. I knelt to look at the stone, the cold mud seeping through my leggings. I scraped off the lichen with my fingernails until they broke.

At last the words become legible.

LEKSA A. WOODS  
loving daughter,  
may she find rest  
and forgiveness  
1798 - 1819

 

_______

 

My tears fell fast and hot and when I stumbled back into bed the sun had already arisen, and my heart ached something awful, there were fingerprints in the fogged-up windows, things stayed in their place but my heart banged in my ribs like a wild thing.

I was being haunted.

 

____


	4. Chapter 4

_____

Days stretched by. The sun weakened and my apartment grew quiet. She didn’t show up for dinner. She didn’t run her hands through my hair, or pad across my floor, or write messages on the dew-wet windows. 

Lexa wasn’t gone. Lexa just wasn’t there.

My face in the bathroom mirror was pale and almost unfamiliar. The creaky tap protested, icy water flowing onto my hands, onto my arms. I washed my face and tied my hair up and tried not to think about the forgotten grave.

I pulled my art supplies from a huge tote, sorted through the colored pencils, the rich gouache and crumbling charcoal. Creamy white paper, my hands blotted and smudged and sketched, thoughtlessly, drawing out the shape of my fear. An hour later I sat back on my heels. My fingers were sooty and my wrists felt like spent elastic. 

A sickeningly dark wood, a woman standing in the middle of it, unknowable. Lilies grew from the place between her ribs. Her face was smudged out and her hands indistinct. Perhaps she’d never been there at all. 

I collapsed into bed with my head spinning, my fingers tired. 

I sat poised at the edge of the bed. 

Goosebumps went up my arms, suddenly, softly. I wasn’t alone. 

______

 

The air hung heavy in the dark room, charged with something you couldn’t name. I look down at my pale legs, the cotton nightgown swishing around my hips. I’m barefoot on the dusty floor of the bedroom. If you looked in the windows, right now, you’d see a girl standing shivering and alone. You wouldn’t see the hairs rising on the back of my neck. You wouldn’t see me swallow the bile in my throat.

“I know you’re there,” I whisper, refusing to let my voice waver. Because I'm not afraid, or I don’t want to be. 

The room is very still, for a long ominous moment, my breath catching in my throat. Outside the window, the sky’s black. My fingers curl around the hem of my nightgown. Every single book rattles on it’s shelf. 

The darkness seeps closer. 

“Are you afraid?” comes a voice, low and heady in my ear. A hot tremor runs down my spine. The voice is warmer than it should be, feels like cherry wine and woodsmoke. Sounds like something to get lost in. 

“No,” I breathe.

“Liar,” the apparition says, voice husky. 

She stands inches from me, more shadow than skin, dark disheveled hair thrown over one shoulder. Her eyes are sharp as knives, and a muddy-hemmed dress hangs from her shoulders. Blood stains her wrists like bracelets. A cold breath is pulled from my mouth. For a moment I feel like a corpse, air tugged from my lungs, and then Lexa shudders into reality, lips flushing pink again.

So this is what my dead girl looks like, truly. Wild and feral and all the more beautiful because of it. She looked like she could eat me whole. 

I stare at her for a long moment, studying every pore and eyelash. She stares back with her human eyes. Smudgy, and not. Gold and silver. Flesh and blood, and a decaying soul with nowhere left to run. The two of us were a world of contradictions.

“I found your grave in the woods,” I said, eyelashes fluttering. Something about this was shameful, horrid. As if my tumbling through rose bushes and ravines were an evil thing. I wondered if she was angry. I wondered if her heart still beat. 

Lexa says nothing, her dark lips curving upwards. She glows in the darkness, like one of those sticky stars that I pasted on my bedroom walls as a child. You could almost see where the sun kissed her cheekbones, centuries ago. You could almost imagine what she’d look like with blood flowing through her veins. 

Before life turned her bitter and death kept her that way.

“I’m sorry, Clarke,” she whispers finally, drawing closer. I can see the small scars and moles on her skin, up close. I see her sharp collarbone and her molten-iron eyes. 

“Me too,” I say, voice breaking. I’m sorry for my sooty fingers and flushed cheeks. I’m sorry about the secrets we keep, I’m sorry about the oxygen in my veins and the hope in my heart. 

She stands inches from me, perfectly still. If I imagine hard enough, I can smell new roses and ashes on Lexa’s breath. 

She leans forward and I don’t expect it, the onrush of icy air. I close the gap between us, pressing my chapped lips against her cold ones. Lexa lets out something like a moan, lips parting beneath mine, not quite skin and not quite air. Someone once said that home was two hands and a heartbeat. Perhaps it was just cold touch and a whisper, a thought. Or maybe home wasn’t something to hold. We were listless things, wandering the Earth searching for something to call our own. 

Kissing a dead girl wasn’t too bad. 

I wind my fingers through Lexa’s hair and pull her closer, savoring the cold rain taste of her lips. She’s freezing and hungry, biting my bottom lip, hands snaking around my waist. Feather-light, feeling the warmth of living flesh beneath the thin cotton slip. How sacred it felt. I forgot how good it felt to be wanted. 

“I love you,” I whisper into Lexa’s neck, my voice cracking and falling away. 

But she’s already gone.

 

———


	5. Chapter 5

———

 

I drive to the closest gas station, a tiny place with greasy linoleum and half-hearted refrigerators lining the walls. An old man with a bristly gray mustache is lounging behind the counter, his eyes lost behind thick glasses. I take a sweaty iced tea from the cooler, and the condensation slicks my fingers. I grab a cheap pay-as-you go phone trapped in plastic. A final bag of chips tucked under my arm.

I push a wad of cash across the counter, and I’m out the door.

The car ride home is quiet and short and I can’t wait to get back. There’s nowhere else to go but home. If I were to drive in the other direction, there would just be cracked roads leading nowhere, twisted trees with red, red leaves, miles of asphalt. Some days it feels like I’ve always been in that house, writing messages in the mirror, falling asleep with a cold, soft breath on the nape of my neck. Falling in love with a ghost was easier than I’d expected. 

I’m trundling down the country roads, past miles and miles of cornfields, withering away in the weak sun. I tear open the phone from it’s packaging and start dialing. I call Bellamy’s shitty blackberry, the same one he’s had since freshman year of high school. Somehow I’ve remembered all nine digits. 

He picks up on the second ring. “Hello, who’s this?”

“Bellamy? It’s Clarke, I got a new phone.”

There was a sharp intake of breath on the other line, staticky. “Jesus, Clarke, are you okay?"

“I’m fine, I . . .”

“You didn’t return our calls,” said Bellamy slowly. Something sank in the pit of my stomach, something dark and slimy. “We thought something happened to you.”

“My phone died, and a bunch of shit went down. I’m sorry,” I said, and it sounded flimsy in my mouth. Not enough.

His voice softened. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m good,” I said, and it wasn’t really a lie. At least I wasn’t lonely anymore. At least I had someone to hold me, to protect me from the cold storms brewing in the distance. There was only a small chance that I had gone completely insane. “Well, I thought my house was haunted. But I figured it out.”

Bellamy laughed. “I’m sure you did. What happened?”

“There’s a ghost here,” I said lightly, smiling as if at a joke. “Good thing is: I think she’s watching out for me."

“I’m glad someone is,” Bellamy said. “Clarke?”

“Yeah?”

He sighed. “We were thinking about road-tripping back to DC in a couple of weeks. Come visit your new house. What do you think?”

“Sounds great. Orphans’ thanksgiving?"

“For sure,” he chuckled again."Your ghost won’t mind having guests, will it?"

I grinned. “Not too much.”

His apartment door slams shut, and there’s a shout. “I gotta go. Bye, Clarke.”

“See you soon,” I murmur, and he’s the first to hang up. 

I pull into the driveway a few moments later, gravel crunching under my tires. The house is grimy and the porch sagging, vines climbing up the entirety of it. A shining girl perches on the porch railing, ivory and surreal. She’s smiling. The house looks beautiful. From this distance, I can’t see the bloodstains or the scars or the absence of breath. 

She’s just Lexa, just white hands and messy hair and warrior heart. Just the smell of dust and pine. I climb the stairs and she pulls me into a whispery embrace. 

“You came back,” she whispers into my hair, and it feels like the wind off the ocean. I was gone for less than an hour, time expanding and contracting, the sun shy over the cornfields. For her, it might’ve been a lifetime. 

“Of course I came back,” I said, pulling away. Her eyes were liquid and bittersweet. They were my favorite color and no color at all. An artist’s nightmare. “This is home."

She smiles, and this time there’s no ache to it.

_ _ _ _ _


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, thank you for all the lovely comments, I appreciate it. Thanks for reading.
> 
> I hope this doesn't break your heart too much.

_ _ _ _ _ 

 

The first snow falls a week later, a powdered-sugar dusting that falls over the frozen earth like something from a storybook. The sky is cloudless and pale gray, watercolor almost. Lexa thrives, dancing in the living room and writing sonnets in the frost. For once, I’m the exception, full of blushing color in this desaturated world.

I’m laying in bed at ten in the morning, unable to move from beneath my comforter. Lexa was facing me, trailing her cold fingers up and down my arm, goosebumps in their wake. Everything is still and absent of heat.

She’s watching me quietly, like I’m the sun shining through the clouds. Like I’m her favorite miracle. 

“Tell me how you died,” I whispered, and the cold fingers stopped in their tracks. She closed her eyes, and for a moment I thought she might disappear, dissolve into the cotton sheets and never come back. 

She opened her eyes again, vivid and gray. “Don’t you want to know how I lived?”

I nodded, and Lexa began.

“I grew up in this house. Back then it was painted blue, and smelled of rose oil and salt. My parents settled here many years before I was born, and they turned the forests into farmland. Planted corn and beans and made a small fortune." She smiled, far-off. 

"When I was sixteen I fell in love. Not with the banker my mother had promised me to. But with a sweet servant girl with brown eyes and a heart of gold. We used to write each other notes. We were going to run away, when the green things grew again. The snow had began to fall furiously, us huddled inside around the fire to keep warm. The blizzards came and never seemed to stop. I never quite felt warm.” 

She shivered. "The storms blew through and destroyed our storage barns. My mother caught ill and never recovered. We lost so much money we might never have recovered from it. All of our staff left except for Costia.”

She stopped suddenly, as if remembering something. “You know, the cook used to tell us stories,” Lexa gazed out the window. “Stories about an ice queen clothed in frost, with a crown of elk horns and forgotten things. She was terrifying and beautiful. If she took you, you’d never come back.”

My breath caught in my throat, and Lexa shimmered warningly in the morning sun. 

“The storm raged for days, and then we were snowed in. We were running out of firewood, burning chairs and doorframes in our desperation. One night . . . While I was asleep, Costia went out to find wood.” Lexa swallowed hard. “When the snow cleared the next day, I found her. Twenty feet from the house, lost. Laying in the snow like an angel, blue with frost and frozen to death.” She shook her head. "The ice queen took her.”

I felt my eyes widen. Still, Lexa looked out the window at the white, white forest. “The next day I found a rusty razor and cut my wrists. I thought I might be reborn somewhere dark, somewhere free. I thought death would be kinder than this wasteland of corruption and ice." 

She touched my cheek. "Didn’t exactly go to plan, did it?"

“Lexa . . .” I murmured, tears freezing in my eyes.

“Thank you," she said. 

I stared at her. “For what?”

“For letting me haunt you.”

_ _ _ _ _ _


	7. Chapter 7

_ _ _ _ _ _

 

I woke up a week later with my head spinning and my eyes wet. I moved about the house, disassociating, my mind full of dreams I was rapidly forgetting. Deep dark twisted dreams in which everyone grew wings and then fell into the sea. I wondered why thoughts turned to hallucinations and then to sleep, to dust.

I made myself toast and laid back down. This was too much, right now.

I awoke with the taste of ashes in my mouth. Raven had sent me a text.

 _ON OUR WAY!!!_ it read, along with a picture of a generic US highway stretching into the horizon. I missed them.

_ _ _ _ _ _ 

 

An hour later, I knocked on the door to Lexa’s apartment.

“Good morning, Ms. Griffin,” she said with mock-formality, standing in the doorway. Her hair was a whirlwind and her eyes were bright. I came inside, stood in the empty front room. Perhaps it was just the darkness of the room, but she seemed less substantial, somehow, even when her hand cupped my cheek. “What can I do for you?” Lexa breathed.

“My friends are coming for Thanksgiving,” I admitted, arms hanging at my sides. “Wanted to warn you, so maybe you could lie low for a while.”

“Lie low?” Lexa said softly, dangerously. Her hand dropped from my face. “This is my house, Clarke. This is where I was born, and this is where my heart stopped beating. I’m sorry that my death is such an inconvenience to you, princess.”

“Lexa, I -“

“I’ll do as you say,” she hissed, blood soaking through her sleeves. “They’ll never know I’m here, I promise you, just please . . . Get out."

I walked out of the empty, dusty room and shut the door behind me, the taste of regret on my hot lips. My breath curled like smoke in the cold air and I cursed it, this life I was gifted. It wasn’t fair that she was condemned to this wretched way of existing. It must hurt to be on the cusp of living, on the edge of death, unable to put an end to it.

She was right, I thought, collapsing onto the couch. I was selfish to expect so much from her. The afterlife was a willful and hellish thing and I had no claim on any of it. I let a tear roll down my cheek. I hated myself for it.

Two days later, Raven’s battered red SUV pulled into my driveway, the tired crunching on the gravel and the three inches of snow. The headlights shone in the windows and the exhaust belched into the frozen air. I could hear her laugh and the sound of bass in their stereo and the feeling of being alive, alive, alive. My own friends seemed so very far away.

_ _ _ _ _ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More tomorrow.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Once, long ago, she loved her much,  
> but love is for children.  
> Love is not enough."  
> -Unfinished poems III // p.m. (via findingbarnes)

_ _ _ _ _ _

 

“Oh my God, Clarke!” shouted Raven, slamming her car door. She ran towards me, boots leaving tracks in the snow. I threw my arms around her, breathing in the smell of motel shampoo and black coffee. Her coat was vivid red and her cheeks flushed pink. Alive.

Bellamy pulled me into a hug, the lasting kind, and when he let go a gust of wind blew away the last of my breath. I helped them haul their things into the house, a couple of sparsely packed duffel bags and then boxes and boxes full of food. Inside, the house was chilly and I hadn’t cleaned well enough and it took half an hour to figure out how to turn up the heat. But they were here. And they were glad to see me.

They were rumpled and vaguely tired, sitting in my kitchen and finishing each other’s sentences. They told stories about the badlands and the small towns, the unfortunate souls who lived there. They told me about a possessed raccoon that lived in a gas station bathroom. Halfway through Tenessee, an old woman tried to cut off Raven’s ponytail while they ate at a diner.

Then they said my house was hard to find, lost between the river and the endless cornfields. The roads were twisting and long, but they made it.

“Are you going to visit your mom?” Raven asked me after an hour, hand in a bag of chips. She was perched on the counter, legs crossed, looking at me with her big innocent brown eyes. My blood rushed to my head, hot flashes of white behind my eyes.

When I was in eighth grade, before things got bad, my family lived in the middle of the city. My mom was a substitute teacher. She worked at the local high school, helping kids pass standardized tests. When I met her, Raven was a freshman with an overactive mind and tinkering hands. She used to come over and help fix the car, tinker with our radio until her eyes got heavy and then fall asleep on our couch. Sometimes I thought she knew Abigail Griffin better than I did.

Raven and I didn’t become friends until the long summer before senior year. We would run to the river and throw rocks, crouch beneath an overpass and tremble as the trucks rattled over our heads. We’d light up fireworks and sing until our voices went hoarse.

Until a tall boy watched the stars with me, kissed my neck until I forgot the lies I’d been told. He loved me until the fire flared in our faces and my car crashed. That summer was one of destruction. A cigarette in his mouth, my voice screaming from far away. It was so beautiful. Until he left in a stolen car and never came back.

Bellamy and Raven were watching me closely.

It was the day before Thanksgiving and my mother was locked away in a penitentiary. It hurt because she belonged there. I know that no one’s perfect, God, I know, but her mistakes were unforgivable. Because of her, I lost my father. The only person who ever told me how loved I was, the only one who never tried to wipe away my tears. I wanted to forgive her but I would never be that person. The orange of her uniform would burn my eyes and I would never ever forget the sight of his blood on her hands.

“No, I’m not,” I said simply, fiddling with the hole in my sweater. “I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

“You never have to be,” said Bellamy from the stove. He was frowning down at three grilled cheese sandwiches in a frying pan. Moths threw themselves at the yellow kitchen light above our heads, casting flickering shadows across the floor.

Raven shook her head, sipping from a mug of red wine. “Just because she’s your mother doesn’t mean you owe her anything. Hear me? You don’t owe her shit.”

Maybe it felt like I was abandoning Abby Griffin. Maybe that was weighing me down.

“I know,” I said. She nodded, satisfied, and my shoulders lifted just a little.

“Hey,” said Bellamy, checking his phone. “Octavia says she’ll be able to make it tomorrow night.”

Thank God. Change of subject. And Octavia always made everything lighter, somehow. Well, unless she started a fight.

Raven rolled her eyes. “Done with her rebellious biker phase, huh?”

“I doubt it,” Bellamy sighed, flipping the sandwiches onto plates. “O’s going to get herself turned into roadkill, I swear.”

“Maybe,” Raven laughed, sitting down at the table. “But she’ll go out in a blaze of smoke, wearing a leather jacket and eyeliner, just like she wants. She’s living the American Dream, no?”

He laughed. “I’m sure she thinks that."

We ate with the radio turned on, quiet enough to talk over. It had been dark out for a long time, the black twisting trees fading into the thick dark sky. Sitting around this creaky little table were people who’d been with me through the worst months of my life, the same people who drove across the continent to see me. And I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t glad to see them. It felt good to laugh.

But Lexa was rotting upstairs, dripping through the cracks in the floor and I’d never be able to save her. There was some part of me that wished for a life like theirs, with beaches and sunsets and driving through the night. I wanted to wake up to a sunrise and run my hands over her sun-kissed skin. The thought was surreal. She was rooted to this house.

But I laughed along with them and tried not to think about my rotting girlfriend or my condemned mother or my ex-boyfriend lost somewhere far, far away. They were here and I was okay and my heart still beat, didn’t it?

Everything was okay. We filled the sink with suds and threw all the dishes in. A text came in, saying that Monty and Miller would be driving up here from DC. It was late and my eyelids grew heavy. The drying rack was full. Everything was okay.

The power went out. Complete dark.

And then the dish rack fell, plates splitting as they hit the ground, cups splintering and all of it in the dark. I stumbled and cut my hands on the shards, blood dripping and I couldn’t find a flashlight, damn it, everything was dark and Bellamy was cursing and pulling me up by the shoulders.

Everything was okay until I fucked it up.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "and you have never/ you have never.  
> you have never loved someone like this.  
> she is your first stomach ache.  
> your first panic attack and your  
> favorite cold shower."  
> \- caitlyn siehl, HER.

\- - - - -

 

“The fuck was that?” Raven said from the kitchen doorway, her face half-illuminated by the tiny flashlight she held.

“Power went out,” I said softly, wincing as her flashlight blinded me, as antiseptic washed over my bleeding palms.

“Jesus,” said Raven, eyebrows furrowed. “What happened to your hands?"

“Dish rack fell,” murmured Bellamy, hunched over my palms with a tweezers. Every so often there’d be a sharp stab of pain, and he’d hold a rose-tinted sliver of porcelain up to the light. There was blood on the sleeve of his sweater.

He didn’t notice, or didn’t care. Bellamy wrapped the whole thing in ace bandages, his eyes far away.

“I’m gonna go check it out,” Raven said, shrugging on her jacket and turning away.

“Wait,” I said, scrambling to my feet. The circuit breaker was in the basement. It was cold and dark and the whole place made my skin crawl. There were names carved into the wood underneath the stairs, scratched by the hands of young girls. I’d found it days ago.

 _Costia + Lexa_ , the writing read, the most tangible thing they’d left behind. Proof of their existence. Proof that I wasn’t entirely insane.

  Raven couldn't go alone. 

“I’ll come with you,” I said, palms stinging still.

Raven hesitated for a moment, then nodded curtly. “Sure."

The plates were shattered on the floor, crunching to dust beneath our shoes. Outside the windows it was cold and hazy and I couldn’t help but feel watched. Raven’s foot creaked on the first stair, then the second. I followed her down, holding my breath like a little kid diving into the deep end for the first time. The flashlight was a thin, wavering line of light.

There was a small puddle of water and it smelled a little like mold and here, she said, hold the flashlight.

The floor was warped. Spiderwebs sat abandoned between the washer and dryer. Raven was popping open the circuit breaker box, my shaky hands training the flashlight on the tangle of wires.

Someone came down the stairs. Someone smaller than Bellamy, graceful.

I swallowed.

Footsteps that didn’t make the stairs creak. Cold breaths grow nearer and I close my eyes.

Everything is still.

My fingers go weak and the flashlight drops to the cement and splutters out. We’re left in the dark, trembling.

“I’m sorry,” whispers a voice inches away, disembodied. Lexa. Holding my hands tight and my palms burn with the cold of it, the bandages blackening like frostbite in my mind’s eye. The basement door slams shut and everything feels like a dream. “For all I’ve done. All I’ll do. I love you, Clarke . . .”

Something seems to roil beneath my feet, some shifting of energy that leaves me breathless and then radio silence.

There’s a spark in the darkness. Raven swears and something switches on. A whirring. The bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling flickers on, yellow and dusty. Lexa is gone.

Raven is calling my name and shaking my shoulders but everything is blurry and the basement door is flung open.

I rip off the bandages and theres’s nothing. Nothing but pink skin and sweat. She's healed me but it doesn't matter, does it?

My head is swimming and overfull, Raven's hand on my wrist. They half-drag me upstairs, hands pulling me into the rosy-warm light of the kitchen. I sit at the kitchen table and someone's stroking my hair.

When I black out, it feels like coming home.

 

\- - - -


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is a little longer than usual  
> Get yourself some water or a drink ok?

\- - - -

  I regain consciousness, my head pounding. I stare at the cracked ceiling with a rotting feeling in the pit of my stomach. Bellamy’s sitting on the ground next to me. 

 

  “How long was I out?” I croak, trying to sit up. Too much work.

 

  “Thirty seconds, give or take.” Bellamy said, turning over my palm and looking at it blankly. “You . . . you weren’t kidding about that ghost, were you?”

 

  “Bellamy. It’s an old house . . . “

 

  “Listen, I won’t tell Raven or O."

 

   I picked at a thread on the hem of my shirt, not wanting to let him know what a mess my mind was. Full of misguided hopes and stunted dreams, likely delusions. I wanted to lie. My best friend was staring at me with dark, dark eyes and a mouth full of truth. It wasn’t the time for lying my way out. 

 

  “I think she . . . She’s been here a long time."

 

  “She’s a woman?” Bellamy asked, looking at the ceiling.

 

  “A girl,” I answered. Because of the way anger shifted across her face, the way her hair fell haphazardly down her back. She was twenty-one when she died. Years and years later she was still a girl, cruel as it was. 

 

  “So she . . . she cares about you?"

 

  “It seems like it,” I said softly. “She cares a lot, for a dead girl.”

 

  He almost smiled. 

 

  Bellamy turned and put away the rest of the first aid kit. I hoped we wouldn’t need it again.

 

   - - - - 

  It’s late when I stumble into bed, and I sleep with the door swung open. I hear Raven and Bellamy as they blow up an air mattress and drag it into the living room floor. They turn out the lights ten minutes later.  They talk. About what, I don’t know, their quiet murmurs muffled by layers of heavy blankets.

  All I hear is my name and something like a promise.

 

  - - - - 

 

  I wake up bleary-eyed with a crease in my cheek left behind by the pillow.

 

  There’s fresh breath on the window pane, condensing. Words drawn in. I remembered drawing faces in the glass, as a child. Now there was poetry in my honor. Something sparked in the hollow pit of my stomach. 

 

_you mean the world to me, sky girl_  

  I sit and stare at it until the peach-pink sun melts the droplets. The whole thing bleeds away without a trace. 

 

  The sun settles in the pale gray sky and finally I roll out of bed.

  My ghost loves me.

 

  - - - - 

 

 

  We spend the next day clamoring and cooking. I awoke to snowfall and the smell of bacon frying. I put on a sweatshirt and set to work, peeling potatoes and throwing things in the oven and finding a place for everyone to sit. Raven sang Christmas songs under her breath. 

 

   I lock the basement door.

 

   Half past one, Raven decorates the house in garlands of fake leaves. We sit at the kitchen table and she shows me her tattoos. One she got to cover her surgery scars at the base of her spine, a roiling mass of ink, birds and flowers and power lines. A shapeless black cloud at her ankle that a stranger did at a party. 

 

  We move the kitchen table into the living room, pushing the couch out of the way. We unfold rickety card tables. 

 

  At five we hear a roar, a growl of engines. I move to the window, and behind me Bellamy sighs heavily.

 

  Octavia Blake stands in the middle of the driveway, snow speckling her unwashed dark hair. Leather jacket and a backpack slung over her shoulder. A sight for sore eyes. She hugs me quickly and smells of the open road. Octavia speaks louder now, with more music to her voice. She’s not the starry-eyed eleventh-grader I last saw.

 

   Octavia looks like a badass, even when she’s stirring cranberry sauce.

 

   She’ll be crashing here tonight, moving west tomorrow. A modern wanderess, a lone wolf with tangled hair and motorcycle boots. I hoped she was happy living like a hurricane. I hoped her brother didn’t get swept up in the wreckage.

 

  Forty minutes later, the Miller family minivan pulls into the driveway, dented and scratched from years of use. Monty is sleeping in the passenger seat. They get out of the car, both staring at the house for a long moment before coming inside. They smile and take their shoes off at the door. 

 

  “Where’s Jasper?” someone inevitably asked, after they’d settled in. 

 

  “He had a funeral to go to,” Miller said, dipping his head. “This girl Maya he went to elementary school with.”

 

   “That’s rough,” Octavia said, eyes wide. 

 

   Poor Jasper. It was always jarring to think of a friend and recall a grave instead of a smile. 

 

 

   - - - - 

 

  The sun has set by the time everything falls into place. The turkey is cooked and the forks clean. It doesn’t seem like the same place it was last week.  I wear pink lip gloss and a big sweater, vainly hoping no one notices the bags under my eyes. 

 

 Raven’s voice echoes across the table. “Everyone say what they’re grateful for.”  A couple of groans, but no one dares disagree.  “Okay, I’ll start . . . I’m grateful for you guys. My real family blows.”    


 

  “I’m grateful for mashed potatoes. And for Monty, because he can read maps.”

 

  “Honestly, guys, I’m just here because Raven makes good pie."

 

  “Okay, um. . . I’m thankful for furnaces and GPS and my big brother."

 

  “I am eternally grateful that Octavia isn’t roadkill.”

 

   "Shut up, Bell."

 

  The wind howls outside the window but here, here it’ll always be safe. It’s my turn. 

 

  “I’m grateful for-“

 

  _Thump thump thump_. Three raps on the front door, desperate and loud. Raven’s head jerks up.  I go to answer it, and there’s a woman on my porch, out of breath from walking so far. There’s a cut on her cheek, her coat woollen and ill-fitting.  “Please,” she says breathlessly, “can I use your phone? My car broke down a few miles from here.”

 

 Lexa’s eyes are wide and innocent, gray as the snow caking her boots. She cared too much and it burns somewhere behind her eyes.

 

  Octavia yelled, “let her in!" 

 

  Holiday spirit, right? Trapped.

 

  “Come on in,” I told Lexa.

 \- - - -  

 


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys, in the past week I've had computer trouble, people trouble, public transport trouble, and a busy schedule, so please forgive me for the lacking wordcount. More tomorrow, hopefully!
> 
> Also, check out my tumblr:  
> lexasghost.tumblr.com

My friends are happy and glowing, offering cellphones to the stranded newcomer. They add an extra plate to the table. In their wine-glazed, well meaning eyes, she’s opaque and well-kept. They don’t see a starved spirit with a syrupy sweet mouth and rotten skirt. They see a female stranger, someone slim and tall and vaguely polite. 

Her gaze shifts coolly around the room. Maybe Lexa wants to be corporeal, warm like the rest of them. Monty wolfing down his cheesy potatoes, Raven’s teasing laugh. I don’t think she remembers what it’s like to grow and shift and sweat. Everything’s behind a gray veil.

Lexa breaths in their thrumming adolescent energy, lets it seep in.

“Turkey?” asked Octavia, well-meaning, eyebrows arched.

“Sure,” the stranger replied with a sweet smile. She glances at me, sidelong. It would be awkward not to, right?

But you see, dead girls can’t always be relied upon to pass heavy plates of sliced turkey. I took the platter from Octavia, forking the thinnest slice onto Lexa’s plate. Saved her the humiliation of shaky mist-light hands and a spoiled Thanksgiving dinner.

And I wanted to feel bitter. I told her to stay away, didn’t I? I told her to hide.

But she came, and she stayed. That’s worth something, right? She wanted me, wanted my imperfections and my house full of friends. Even as a stranger, a shifting shadow. 

I could never hate her, with her summer-rain eyes and curving smile.

The stranger stayed, at least for the time being.

___

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Possible trigger warning for the next few chapters: gore/blood/trauma described in detail. Stay safe & thanks for reading.


	12. Chapter 12

___

 

 

 “Where are you coming from?” Bellamy asked Lexa, head tilted to the side, his black curls cascading down into his eyes. The light filtered in, unsure. The tablecloth was rough and already stained with cranberry. Bloodred. I could see the veins shift in Lexa’s neck. 

  In his eyes, Lexa was not the ghost, shimmering. The apparition that had healed me in more ways than one. 

 

  She was a reality, and he was looking right at her. 

 

 “Here,” said Lexa, glancing at me briefly, a small betrayal.  “Actually, I’m from D.C. I was going out west to visit my family. What’s left of it, anyway. My automobile crashed into a tree, but I was able to climb out and walk here. They’ll miss me, but not too much.”

 

  _Automobile_? Raven mouthed, unnoticed.

 

 “God, that blows,” Octavia said, raspy, the closest she got to voicing empathy. As her head turned, I noticed a tattoo snaking around the back of her ear, some sort of serpent. Rushed, made by the hand of a friend. Octavia always said how much she hated snakes. Not hated, feared. O was trying to be fearsome, little girl from the south side, crawling from a ramshackle life with bruises unhealed. 

 

  And Lexa’s food sat untouched on the plate. Congealing, glazed. “I called a tow truck,” she lied. 

 

  Heads nodded around the table, and the conversations went on. Octavia’s suffering music career, six demos turned down. The huge pulsing light over Southern California and no, Raven, the authorities said it wasn’t aliens. Then Miller’s aunt and her brain tumor the size of an orange, Monty's comforting hand on the other boy's arm. I was the only one who saw. 

 

  Both Blakes talking fast, drinking the sight of each other in. It would be months before they’d see each other again. We’d all separate like raindrops down a car window, slip into different paths. Such was life, no use mourning it.  The food was better than expected, delicious even. Only a little burnt, but much more than you would expect from a bunch of orphans and delinquents. 

 

  Octavia's phone chimed and a smile washed over her face, blue light illuminating her porcelain skin. Miller's soft blush. Raven eating the last cranberries off of Bellamy's plate. I thought about the obsession people had with love. Documenting how it could change you. Like it was something tangible, something you could be pressed through. Love could crystallize you, hold you in your place like a fly trapped in pine sap, waiting for the years to turn you to golden amber. Love can turn you brittle.  I take Lexa’s hand under the table.

 

  The air leaves my lungs.

 

  Lexa's hand isn’t cold, ethereal in the way it was. It's solid and clammy as rubber, something pulled from ruins. She looks at me for a long moment, the snowfall outside reflecting on the wetness of her eyes. There's pain etched into the fine lines of her face, and then. And then Lexa’s face drops. Leaves . . . 

 

  Octavia screams, a ringing surreal thing. Raw. 

 

  It’s not that her body’s gone. But Lexa has left it. 

 

  A corpse sits on the seat next to me, bleeding through the carpet. Her mouth slack, eyes filmed. I’ve never seen her before, forty years old and three hours dead. Mangled legs crushed from a car crash. 

 

  Car swerved off the road when she fell asleep, no braking on this ice. No survivors.

 

  Lexa walked her here. 

 

 


	13. Chapter 13

  The room erupted in chaos. Shouting, one question after the next. Terror. Octavia arguing with someone, with no one, her thin voice covering the room like a sheet. Monty, head down, clearing all the food off the table. Color blurring, red seeping into the carpet. 

 

  “What the fuck was that?” asked Raven, speaking to no one in particular. Her brown eyes were wide, turned gold by the sunlight streaming in.

 

  Bellamy’s jaw clenched. “Nothing good."

 

  There was a corpse sitting at my table. Mascara clotted on her thin lashes, blood dribbling down out of her mouth. A parody of beauty, wrapped up in a silvery down coat. I wondered if she had family. I wondered if they’d actually miss her.  

 

   “Hell no,” Miller said, backing away with his hands raised. 

 

   Like someone was pointing a gun at him, almost accusatory. Monty was taking deep breaths, carefully Saran-wrapping what’s left of the turkey before carrying it out. We all had our ways of coping, I guess. I looked at the dead woman staring blankly out the window. As if she could see the snow fall from the sky, gray as ash. Raven was moving around listlessly, blinking. Nothing seemed to make sense, right then. 

 

  “Clarke,” Bellamy said, not harshly, pulling me gently up and out of my chair. “Do you have any idea what just happened?”

 

   I pursed my lips, feeling unanchored. Scared of what they might do, maybe. Scared of what I might do. 

 

  “It was your ghost, wasn’t it?” Bellamy asked me, his voice steadier than I’d ever felt. 

 

   “Yes,” I breathed, something jagged in my throat. “She’s —"

 

   “Hey. Come on.” Bellamy touched my wrist, and I realized he was taking my pulse. “We need to get rid of the body.”

 

   He was right, of course. Anonymous, faceless do-gooders would come, see the broken car in the ditch and wonder what happened there. Maybe red and blue lights pulling into the driveway, asking about the pool of blood on my carpet. No one was at fault here, no one at all. I wasn’t bitter enough to blame a well-meaning ghost trapped in this ancient house. 

 

  See, If a plane's engine caught fire in the middle of the desert, and the pilot had no choice but to crash, who would blame them? Not me, not most people. Maybe Lexa’s mode of transportation was questionable and awkward and maybe I hated her a little, in this moment. It would pass. 

 

  Lexa only wanted to meet those who nurtured me. Maybe so she could do the same. 

  “It’s too cold outside to bury the body,” Raven said, appearing at my elbow. Her face was set into a grim mask, the way it was a year ago when everything turned to shit. “Our best bet is to dump it in the woods and cover it with brush.”

 

  I shook my head. “We put it back in the car. There’s nothing to hide, is there?”

 

  Raven's face was flushed. “What supernatural shit was that?”

 

  “I have no idea what just happened,” I said, but it wasn’t untrue. 

 

  “Tell me,” she said, her words like knives, the most dangerous dare I’d ever gotten. “I’m not an idiot. I know that what just happened was not natural. The girl that knocked on the door and the woman dead in that chair are two different people. Jesus, Clarke.” Her eyes were full of tears, the kind she got only when she was angry. She swiped at them. “There’s bad energy in this house. It’s toxic. You can’t stay here alone.”

 

  I wasn’t alone. What pain Lexa caused me, she felt doublefold. But the urgency in Raven’s eyes turned me to stone.

  Octavia cleared her throat. Behind me, she was gazing down at the woman in the chair. “Guys. Shut up and help me carry it out of here."

 

  So the woman, the body, has become an _it._  And it’s easier that way. We tie scarves around her mouth, a ratty blanket around her body, and carry her out the front door, my arms wrapped around her stiff, crushed legs. On the porch I realize something’s poking my arm, piercing through the sleeve of my sweater. Splintered fibia, cream-white and covered in blood, stabbing through her flesh. I swallowed down a shout.

 

  We walked two and a half miles or so, treading carefully through the snow on the side of the road. The occasional chip bag or stunted cigarette beneath our feet. Every so often we’d stop, re-shift the body. Move on. There were trees everywhere, towering over our heads, snow resting on the fallen leaves like icing. White light shone through the branches, casting shadows on the slick road. 

  Octavia walked just behind me, holding the bent ankles, the cheap boots. She always rubbed her eyes when she was nervous, a nervous tic from her childhood. Today it was bad, black streaks fell down her face, bits of eyeliner wiped astray. Part of me wanted to apologize. But that would just be to comfort myself. 

 

  “There,” breathed Raven as we turned the corner, just loud enough for all of us to hear. “It’s the car."

 

  A dark blue subaru sat crumpled in the ditch, curled against a pine tree. Air bags clotted the windows, and shards of windshield littered the ground, blue and glistening. It looked like it had been there a long time, an ancient artifact from a lost civilization. Octavia wrenched open the frozen-shut driver’s door, grimacing. We propped her up inside. 

 

 Head against the dashboard, feet on the floor. Limp and seemingly undiscovered. Raven, shivering, bent down and closed the milky-white eyelids with the tips of her fingers. Gentle. She slammed the door shut.

 

 We stood there lingering for a moment too long. Looking in through the cracked car window, wondering what kind of people left someone to rot in an icy ditch. They turned to leave, footsteps soft on the asphalt.  

 

  “ _May we meet again_ ,” I said softly to the dead woman in the crushed car, to the deflated air bags and the chipped blue paint. That was all I could do. That was all I could say.  We swept away our footprints and left without a trace, without a tear.

 

 


	14. Chapter 14

 

 

 

  Halfway back to my house, along the wet and desolate road, we stopped. The sun had fallen out of reach, leaving the sky black and yawning.  Someone’s phone had a flashlight, shining desolately onto the road. Raven in her dingy red jacket, hunched over, retching. Bellamy’s hand rested on her back. 

 

  “What's wrong?” I asked her, biting my lip.

 

  She swiped at her mouth with the back of her hand, eyes lowered. Gloveless, her hands pink with the cold. Bellamy shrugged off his coat and draped it around her shoulders, despite her halfhearted mumbles of dissent. 

 

  Raven's face was pale in the shaky artificial light.  “Must have caught the flu or something.”

 

  “Come on, the house isn’t that far away,” said Octavia, walking past. Her boots were heavy on the slick ground.

 

  We kept walking, my fingers numb. The night wasn't any kinder than the day. 

 

  * \- - - - 



 

  When we got back, the porch light was shining like a golden beacon from a lighthouse. A sigh of relief on their lips, and we clambered up the steps. Inside, the carpet was gone and the table was clear, everything smelling faintly of bleach. 

 

  Octavia kicked off her boots and pulled her phone out of her pocket. Tap, tap, tap on the screen. She better not be telling her boyfriend about the dead woman we just disposed of. 

 

  "How did it go?" asked Monty innocently from behind a handfull of cards.

 

  "Stellar," said Raven flatly. 

 

   He and Miller had been playing cards on the couch, their mouths set into vague almost-smiles. They were practiced in the art of faking normalcy, obviously, some sort of tic from their childhood. When I moved around the kitchen with hawk’s eyes, searching for imperfection, there was not a drop of blood anywhere.  The refrigerator is overflowing but neat, everything stacked in tupperware containers and wrapped in tinfoil. 

 

  Twenty minutes later, the two boys pack their things and give me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Stay safe, they said, scarves muffling their voices. They spent fifteen minutes scraping ice and snow off their windshield then left, half-blind. The mini-van trundled out of the driveway into the desolate night.

 

  I hoped they wouldn’t be the next ones bleeding out in a ditch.

 

  * \- - - - 



 

  “What do we do now?” asked Octavia, cracking the small bones in her fingers. She spoke to the room, to the cracks in the ceiling, no one in particular.  Her backpack was fat and unzipped, her socks mismatched. She was frantic figure pretending not to be.

 

  It was eleven at night, hours since the two boys left. Outside the wind howled bleakly, terribly. At least I hoped it was the wind doing the howling.

 

  “We try to get some sleep,” said Bellamy, sighing. 

 

  Raven shook her head, looking out the window. There was only a sliver of outside visible, the rest obscured by heavy gray curtains. Raven could never be blank, never empty, but she seemed conflicted with the blizzard reflected in her eyes. Nature could be terrifying. It was as if the snow and the sky had gotten into a fistfight, wind whipping the trees and slicking the pavement with a mirror-like glaze.

 

  Raven deadbolted the door. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to."

 

  * \- - - - 



 


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "  
> Bring your ear to the water  
> and I’ll sing you
> 
> down into my arms.
> 
> Let me show you how
> 
> to make your lungs  
> a home for minnows, how
> 
> to let them flicker
> 
> like silver
> 
> in and out of your mouth  
> like last words,
> 
> like air.
> 
> "   
> -Saeed Jones, from “Mississippi Drowning” (via fables-of-the-reconstruction)

 

  I woke up earlier than I should have. A few minutes past six o’clock and the sky was dead black, not a trace of morning. Maybe the sun would never return, never hover over the horizon and we’d all be lost in the blue dark, fathomless. God, I needed coffee.

  “Good morning,” said Bellamy from the doorway, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “If you can even call it that.”

 

  I smiled. “Coffee?”

 

  “Sure,” he said.

 

  I poured him a mug, watching the tiny bubbles swirl and dip. The black liquid steamed in the dim ceiling light, like the smoke signals they used hundreds of years ago. As a warning, as a gathering. “When are you guys heading out? You know you’re welcome to stay as long as you want."

 

  He took a scalding gulp of coffee. “We’ll probably head out after breakfast. Raven’s feeling sick, we should probably get home sooner than later.”

 

  “Makes sense,” I said. “And Octavia?”

 

  “Octavia’s headed to DC, then going to Annapolis with her boyfriend for a few weeks,” said Bellamy, sighing. “She says it’s a fresh start, whatever that means."

 

  Probably means she’ll smoke pot and she’ll cough her lungs out, the first time. She’ll get a regrettable tattoo and hang out in dingy vinyl shops with a horde of wannabe hipsters. Her bruises had to heal eventually. “She’ll be okay,” I predicted.

 

  He nodded absently. He knew this already, and yet the worry still seeped in. Bellamy clears his throat. “You know, part of me doesn’t want to leave you here."

  “I’m sorry that you feel that way,” I said, and it comes out unexpectedly cold. 

 

  “Listen. I don’t want you to be the next corpse sitting at the kitchen table.”

 

   “She wouldn’t do that, Bellamy,” I said. And she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t drink herself blind on the youthful energy pouring out of their skin, not again. She was stretched thin from the walk to the broken-down car, clipped from her roots. Lexa lost control. People like her never let history repeat itself.

 

  He leaned forward. “How do you know?”

 

  “Because she’s lonely, not bloodthirsty,” I said, and my voice went soft. Maybe Lexa was listening, maybe not. And it didn’t matter. I was spitting at my best friend with all the venom of a snake and God, he didn’t deserve it. He was honey and woodsmoke, all the childhood memories you forgot. I drew in a breath. “You have to know she never wanted any of us to get hurt."

 

  “I believe you. But this ghost is just a remnant of whatever it used to be. There’s no telling what it’s capable of, on purpose or otherwise,” he said. “I won’t tell you what to do, God knows you’re too stubborn for that. Stay or leave, it’s your choice. Just remember that there’s an empty seat in the car headed out west, and you’re welcome to it."

  “Okay,” I said. Because siren song would ever match the wind in the pines, the groaning in the walls. This was my home now. More than my childhood apartment nestled in gray suburbia ever had been, more than the hollow place in Finn’s chest where I curled up and got lost. They could have their water breaking over rocks, their gasoline stains and blood orange sunsets. 

 

  All I wanted was the blue dark in the throat of the woman I loved. The grace in her hands. How she walked like forest goddess come alive, feasting on the decay that grew in my chest. Bare feet dancing on the frost-ridden grass, unafraid.

 

  This house was a lot of things and none of them temporary. 

 

 

___________

 

 

We ate breakfast an hour later, leftover food melted together in bowls. Congealed gravy over fluffy potatoes, the sugary pinkness of cranberry seeping into turkey meat. All of us sat on the half-deflated air mattresses on the living room floor, exhausted and desperate to stay warm. It felt good to be there, right then, laughing about Octavia’s tendency to get cranberry sauce in her hair. 

 

  Raven had on her thick gray socks with small Christmas trees on them, then the cartoonish reindeer with bulbous red noses. She glanced outside, hair hanging in tendrils around her face. It wasn’t bright out today, the kind of day where everything was gray and strangely beautiful because of it. The ice and snow were melting a little, slicking the gutters wet, exposing yellow grass. 

 

  “Do you ever get lonely?” asked Octavia, once we were the only ones left sitting.  Raven and Bellamy had gotten up and were clanging around in the kitchen. Octavia's hands ran over her stuffed-full backpack. Ever the wanderess, a heroine ready to flee at the drop of a hat. Her head lolls against the wall. For the first time I notice the half-dozen piercings puckering her ears, the silhouette of them like a foreign city cutting into the sky.

 

 “Sometimes,” I admit. I’d always been the kind of person to enjoy my solitude, never crying over lost time. Lonesome fit me like a glove. "Why do you ask?”

 

 “I just don’t want to end up alone.” Octavia looked down at her lap, at the empty bowl she held there. Of course she’d have that aching fear of being abandoned. Kicked to the curb like a insect-infected couch, and for what? Most people were lovable if you squinted hard enough. “You know? Someday I might turn around and everyone will be gone."

 

  An image flashed through my mind, an instant. Bloody razor and frozen ground, two girls with their cold hands grasping at each other. Love could hunt you down wherever you stood. “I know how that feels,” I said. “But whoever’s meant to stay with you will. Don’t hold on too tight.”

   Her eyes lower for a moment, and I imagine her wandering the twisting forest growing in her skull. Falling over rocks and gullies, moss growing from the tender skin of her lips. I think she was meant to be an unanchored soul, running and running. Her lips were parted just a little, then she smiled. 

  “I should get ready to go,” said Octavia, getting to her feet.

 

 

_______________

 

 

  I brushed snow from the top of their car with a stick. There was a grating sound as Bellamy grated a layer of ice off the windshield, just enough to be able to see out. His breath billowed out, steaming. Octavia had already left for DC, swaddled in coats and borrowed scarves. The snow was fresh, fallen just last night. Almost as if the clouds protested: _stay, stay, stay._

 

 “Clarke?” Bellamy said, when the windows were clear. “You sure you’re not coming with?"

 

  I pulled my coat tighter around me. “I’m sure.”

 

  He looked up at the house, with the faded shutters and sagging porch. I wondered if he saw something there, in the highest window. Someone waving goodbye, perhaps. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

 

_____________

 

  Raven appeared on the front porch with a bittersweet smile and a purse stuffed with snacks. She walked down the steps looking like a fairytale creature in a red coat, her footsteps unbelievably small in the layer of new snow. 

 

  She hugged me tightly. “I’ll miss you. Be safe, okay? Call me if you need anything.”

 

  I didn’t point out that she would be halfway across the continent by tomorrow, or that hardly anything could hurt me, now. “I will,” I assured her, smiling. Her brown eyes turned hard and flat in the winter. I always wondered why.

 

  Bellamy swallowed any protest he had about me staying here. I know he thought this place was toxic. I know he thought I’d be safer somewhere else, anywhere else. I hugged him extra tightly and told him to take care. 

 

  They waved as they drove away, still smiling as the car rolled out.

 

  “May we meet again,” I said, staring at the twin trails of crushed snow left behind by their tires. 

 

   ___________

 

 

  When I finally walked back into the house, I felt numb. I took off my coat and my shoes, padding around the house in my thick warm socks. 

 

  A moment later, I realized that something was wrong. 

 

  The air was tainted with something green and smoky, something burning. I ran to the kitchen, to the cold stove, frantically searching for the source of a fire. Not now. Not now. Not now. I barely even registered the crunch of salt beneath my feet.

 

  In the bathroom there was a bundle of sage tied with twine. It was burning and infusing the air, almost penetrating the walls. Drifting upstairs, undoubtedly. I ripped it from the wall and snuffed it in the sink, gasping for air. Five bundles all around the house. It was too late. I could hardly breathe. 

 

  Slow down, Clarke. I collapsed onto the floor, resting against a wall. Sage. It was meant for healing and cleansing. Raven had left them burning, meaning the best, oblivious. Salt circles on the floor to guide them into darkness. Sage was for cleansing of bad energy, restless spirits, I’d heard them say it all before. It was never like this.

 

  It could be choking the life from her. 

 

  “ _Lexa_ ,” I called out, my voice raw. Again, again, again.

 

  If she replied, I couldn’t hear it. 

 


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "ELEKTRA : I ask this one thing: / let me go mad in my own way."  
> -Sophokles, Elektra (tr. by Anne Carson)

\- - - - 

 

I hardly slept. Not afraid of the dark like I used to be, and it wasn’t as if my mind were empty. I felt listless, floating on the wind like a scrap of paper. I was lost, painted over, scrapped. Nothing felt like it used to.

I started to obsess. Pour my pain into watery ink and the viscous acrylic paint. Lexa, warped. Lexa on a war horse with eyes inky black, a nightmare. Lexa shimmering in the morning light, the unreality she was. I drew famine and blood, I drew kisses and the softness of her hair.

I survived on canned beans and frozen fruit, never feeling hungry enough to warrant a grocery run. Once I laced up my boots and put on my coat, trudging out into the woods to find the small graveyard again. I remembered in my mind’s eye, the ash trees with their silvery leaves, the wrought iron gate half fallen over. I thought it would be easy to find. I was wrong, I guess: I never saw her grave again. 

Weeks later I gathered the energy to clean the house. I did the dishes, made my bed. I emptied the little trashcan in the bathroom. There was something odd in there, nothing I’d seen before. I fished it out of the rubbish, held it to the light, the slender piece of creamy white plastic. A pregnancy test. 

Something Raven had left, emblazoned with two thin red lines. Positive.

“Shit,” I breathed, and sat down on the couch. 

I wondered what she would do. Everything was muted and muffled and none of us were quite ready to bring new life into this world, were we? And it meant nothing, really, this decision was hers. Maybe they’d keep it and nourish it with every bit of wisdom their parents never gave to them. They’d raise someone sun-drenched and smiling. 

Life went on, carrying us with it, pulling us under. 

And there was an aching emptiness in the middle of my chest, still. Like someone had taken a razor and carved my heart out piece by piece. It was okay. It was okay because the hole had a name and it’s name was hers. Hers, decaying. Hers, forever.

\- - - - 

 

The food had run out and the days were warm, molten. Rain fell in soft droplets that stuck to the windows and made the yard sticky and mud-slick. It wasn’t the kind of weather I’d expected, the week before Christmas. The warmness came not from spring but from something insidious and burning, warmness that came from human gluttony eating away at the atmosphere, at the air. 

It was hard to fathom this now. The sun hung heavy like a golden fruit in the sky, almost rotten. The air smelled of damp grass and waiting. It was hard to feel empty, when my face turned up to the sun like a flower in the summertime. I wore two sweatshirts and there wasn’t a trace of cold in my body. Funny, how this used to make me happy. 

With the cold gone, there was nothing left to remind me of her.

I could have done it, really. Packed up my things and driven away in my busted-up car. Fled into the sunflower-colored sunset with nothing but the forest and it’s emptiness behind me. I wasn’t trapped here by anything but delusion and pride, and I knew that. 

But I stayed, watching a ladybug climb painstakingly slow up the leg of my pants. It crept forward with a certain kind of intention, like it was meant to save the day, fulfill a prophecy. I brushed it off, the dry shell falling to the ground. So much for heroism.

\- - - - 

That night I stayed up late again. Same story, sitting at the kitchen table with a listless mind and staring at a blank piece of paper. The ink didn’t flow and the blood seemed sluggish in my veins. Nothing was the same yet so little had changed.

Christmas was days away, and I’d set up a two-foot-high synthetic pine tree in the kitchen windowsill. It was pathetic, strung with a couple of crappy sentimental ornaments I’d made in Kindergarten, the rickety boughs wound up in a garland of sparkly ribbon. There was an unwrapped cardboard box beneath it, something from Raven and Bellamy. A worn postcard signed by Octavia, her note scrawled in red pen. Merry Christmas, it read, don’t party too hard without me :)

Oh, Octavia. I’d try my best. 

I turned the card over and over in my hands, feeling where the paper had crumpled or torn. Pine trees and blue sky emblazoned the front. It struck me as an afterthought, the kind of thing you bought out of obligation. I wasn’t ungrateful. Never ungrateful as long as she was happy and didn’t have to think too hard about the girl in the cold dead farm house. 

The Christmas lights reflected in the window, flickering like dismal little fireflies. My own eyes stared back at me with a surprising sharpness, buried in a face that seemed to belong to a stranger. I thought of last December and how I was drunk on misconceptions, wrapped in wool sweaters. Warm in the arms of a boy far too in love with himself to truly see anyone’s worth. Except for mine, maybe, and that was the worst part. 

I should go see my mother in her maze of gray concrete. Did she weep for me? For anyone? I wondered if her hands were busy now that she couldn’t sew stitches or fill syringes. Her hair might’ve started to split at the ends like it did in the wintertime. Eight years left. Two thousand, eight hundred and thirty-nine days until she’d walk back into the free world. I checked the days off the little calendar in the corner.

I wasn’t losing anyone else.

I grabbed a pen from the counter and began writing on the blank piece of paper. The alphabet scribbled out in all caps, desperate. I used a plastic ring from the milk carton. Ghosts didn’t care if you Ouija board was home-made, right?

“If you can hear me,” I said carefully, my fingers poised over the paper, helpless, “tell me if you’re coming back.”

The air stirred. Everything was breathless and nothing . . . Nothing changed except for my bated breath.

Stupid, stupid girl. I stared at the paper until my eyes were stinging and aching to close. I don’t remember falling asleep.

\- - - - - 

 

In my dreams I heard someone singing. It wasn’t in English, no, but I knew the words. A lullaby for a fussy child or an aching soul, for someone lost. The voice was raw and dipped low when it wanted to. The kind of voice capable of screaming and clamoring. The voice of a queen.

Fingers running up and down my arms. Light and gossamer, the feeling of ice trailing across my skin. Lexa took my shaking hand and held it against her smooth, clear cheek. I smelled jasmine and dust on her hair. 

“You were meant for more than this,” she told me, lips blurred like a watercolor painting gone wrong. 

I woke up with my mouth dry and arms numbed with cold as if they’d been buried in snow this whole time. I’d fallen asleep at the kitchen table, my joints gone stiff and creaky. I was slicked with a thin layer of sweat, greaselike. The Christmas lights were the only source of light, white and dull.

I could hear the singing, still, a voice like mountains moving. Coming up the basement stairs like something insidious. But I knew better. 

“Lexa,” I said, half a sob, half a prayer. God, I felt like a melting bit of dirty snow. Pathetic. There was saliva stains on the edges of my mouth and it sounds stupid but she was the brightest thing I’d ever held. Yes I was someone worth loving but she, she hurt to look at. She was the solar flares and the iron in the dirt. Running in my veins. 

“Shhh,” she said, behind me, but my head wouldn’t turn. My body went slack, only my eyes and my ears working overdrive. Frozen.. Lexa’s voice was gravel and gravestone. “You are all I dream of, you know that? My living girl, loving girl. Save the fight for another day, Clarke.”

She kissed the top of my head, and the smell of rain and sweet decay overwhelmed me.

I awoke swimming in sweat and fever dreams, orange-tinted and fanged. I awoke under a thin cotton blanket with water at my bedside table. 

She was here, even as a hallucination, even as a whisper. 

__________


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story is likely coming to an end, soon. thanks for sticking with me...
> 
>  
> 
> \- - - - 
> 
> “I look at her and light goes  
>  all through me.” 
> 
> by Charles Bukowski, Selected Letters: 1965-1970 v. 2

 

 My fever broke and I felt as if I was waking from an eternal slumber of the mythical kind. In this story the castle was run down and shoddy and it's sleeping beauty was terribly unhappy. For she was all alone, and her one true love was not only monstrous but slain upon the floor. All the princess had left was her fortress and her army of thorns. 

 

  I stared at myself in the mirror above the bathroom sink. Not a sleeping beauty but wide awake and starkly unattractive, bags under my eyes and hair pasted to my temples. I took a cold shower and washed the sickness from my skin. 

 

  It wasn’t all bad, I suppose, these weeks of fever and festering. On the worst nights she came and visited me. Lexa's voice seethed from the walls like the wind whistling through the pines and it was strange to think I’d ever been afraid of her. She began to re-make herself. Manifesting as a shadow on the floor or a reflection in the mirror, something slender at the corner of my eye. Both of us grew strong, me on chicken broth and white sunlight and her on the crumbs of whatever weak energy thrummed through my body. 

 

  Lexa was here now. Shivering like a reflection on a pool of water, my own photo negative staring back at me. After all this time, I still can’t look her in the eye. She stood tall as a mountain, but I knew the truth. She was dust and broken promises. 

 

  “You left a corpse at my kitchen table,” I said. “And my friend tried to kill you. Permanently."

 

   “Seems like we’re even, then,” she said, with a small smirk and a toss of her hair. Curls fell to her waist, iridescent and shining, and today she looked years older than she had before. Her shadowless figure stood still as a tree in front of me, bare wrists turned out like an invitation. Come, her eyes said, take my arteries and take the sunlight on my skin. “And to be fair, I’m half gone already."

 

    “You’re all I have left,” I said, and it sounded pathetic. A last stand, almost, the hollow exhalation of a dove shot from the sky. 

 

   Lexa took a step closer, her face half-collapsed from something like joy, something like grief. Love, and her mouth opened and closed again. The sun was just rising, dying everything red-gold, turning her soft. Gentle almost. She bent down and lay her head against my chest. I could feel my heart beating deep down in the cavernous expanse of my chest, and her sweet-smelling head resting between my breasts. I paused, for a moment, and I breathed. 

 

   Lexa straightened, closer than ever. “All this world and you choose me. Why?"

  “Because you see me, fuck-ups and all. You understand.” And right then, that was enough. 

 

  But she could have more. Miles away, in the big city, she could feast on the electric energy of a thousand people and drink their thoughts like wine. Swirl around hopes and dreams in a crystal glass and take what she wanted from it. I saw her, clearly in my mind’s eye. Running and running from this wretched house with her hair trailing behind her like a beacon.

 

  “We could leave this place, you know,” I breathed, tucking a strand of dark hair behind her ear. “We could run and never come back. Do you permit it?"

 

  Her eyes flashed like a wolf’s in the dark, phosphorescent, and she nodded slowly. She took my hand, mist holding fever into a form. She squeezed my palm, once, a reassurance. She’d follow me wherever I may go.

 

 

_____


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last chapter. Thank you for sticking with me through all of this, thank you for reading and supporting me through writing this wack-ass sad gay ghoststory. 
> 
> pro tip: get yourself some water and some tissues.

A backpack like schoolchildren wore on the first day of school. It was a muddy shade of royal blue and the zipper sometimes got caught for no reason, but it was semi-functional and strong. It was packed full with sweatshirts and jeans, a toothbrush and paste, sea salt and my folded-up makeshift ouija board pressed between the pages of a notebook. That was the last thing I threw into my little four-door sedan, setting it on the floor on the passenger’s side.

 

  When I closed the car door with a metallic _whump_ , Lexa stood not two feet away. She looked completely ordinary, though her dress was a bit muddy and her skin too translucent to be completely human. But she was here, and I’d even cleared the passenger seat for her. A throne made up of cheap gray upholstery. It still smelled like pomegranate and clementine from the smoothie I spilled ages ago. She sat down, slowly running her hands over the dusty dashboard. 

 

  “You don’t mind having things by your feet, do you?” I asked her with a grin, turning the keys in the ignition. The car reluctantly sputtered to life. 

 

  “It won’t bother me terribly, no.” Lexa smiled, the small hairs around her face blowing in a wind that I didn’t feel. Her hand found mine, whispery cold, and held it tight. I wasn’t sure if she was reassuring me or herself. “Are you ready to leave, Clarke?”

 

  “Yeah,” I looked up at the big house with the shingles sliding off, and the dull windows, the cracked gray paint. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been here, really, but it felt near to an eternity. I think I once read a story about a queen sleeping under a mountain. I think she was waiting for the Earth to become more peaceful, or for the ravens to block out the sun with their wings. Maybe she was a criminal serving out a sentence. I didn’t remember, but this tale seemed awfully relatable right about now. “Are you?"

 

  She nodded, her hand still in mine. Her eyes never wavered. I wondered if she’d miss this place. Her life had begun and ended here, and now she was leaving all of it for me. Me, an ungrateful drifter who’d let her down so many times. Salt and sage could only wash away so much. 

 

  I imagined it. We could settle down in the city. Maybe somewhere by the water, where the houses were all squished together like children sitting shoulder to shoulder. I saw Lexa in my mind’s eye. Fingers pressed against the clear glass of a bedroom window, city lights flickering warm in the distance. There was a cherry tree blossoming in the front yard. Flowers curling into the sky, baby pink and glaringly temporary. We had each other, and that’s all we’d ever need. 

 

  I stepped on the gas pedal, the car shuddering as it pulled away from the house. The gravel driveway seemed endless as it crunched beneath our tires. It seemed to beg us to stay. This, this was the last time I’d leave this house. Lexa's hand on my arm, fearless, easing onto the twisting roads that towards DC. Towards the ocean.

 

  Towards whatever the universe had in store for us. 

 

  - - - - - 

 

  The trees flew past the window like skeletons dancing, heralding a new world. The sky was an odd milky gray, and clouds seeping down and settling in the trees. Lexa’s fingers drummed on the windowsill, a soft beat that might’ve matched the imagined beating of her heart. I drove and drove. Over hills and past broken-down houses. We sat in silence. The kind of quiet that I could wrap around me like a blanket. 

 

  My heart beat was sluggishly slow, a reminder of everything I’d endured. A reminder of how lucky and how cursed I truly was. 

 

_She was with me she was with me she was with me._

 

  “Stop,” said Lexa suddenly, spitting the world out like she had been choking on it. “You have to stop the car, Clarke."

 

   I stepped hard on the brakes, the seatbelt biting into the skin at my throat. I pulled to the side of the road and turned to her. My hands were outstretched but there was no bleeding to staunch. Her arms were wrapped around herself, maybe in a vain effort to hold herself together. But she wasn’t something to be held together. She was wild as the wind whispering through the trees. She was nothing but memories and broken promises.

 

   Lexa sucked air in through her teeth. 

 

  I almost asked her if she needed help. The words were acidic on my tongue, the empty offer of help that I wasn’t able to give. I reached over and smoothed the hair away from her face. She glanced up at me like a wounded animal, close to bolting. Cold pulsed through my arm. When I looked down at my hands I half expected them to be frostbitten. Without a word she pushed open the car door, or perhaps melted through it. 

 

  Lexa staggered out onto the gravel roadside and broke into a run. She might have tripped on the hem of her dress, raggedy with dirt. I left my car at the curve in the road, my boots hitting the earth without a second thought. Lexa's body turned into nothing but a mirage shimmering ahead of me, the kind that lead desert wanderers to their deaths. My throat was dry. The wind whipped in my hair, snatching away the scarf I had twined around my neck. It wasn’t worth searching for but she was. 

 

  This girl was the first person to truly see me as I was. Lexa had eased my soul into her hands and picked it apart with her ivory fingers. After, she washed the rot from her hands and told me that nothing lasts forever.  Not even when I lay with my head resting on her shoulder, all those months ago, forgetting for a moment that soulmates were not real. 

 

  I found her with her face turned towards the sky, her neck pale and unprotected. I wasn’t even sure if she heard me approach, with the sickly green sheen to her skin and the sweat on her temples. Lexa seemed so defenseless. The victim. Some feral animal part of me wanted to wring her neck, like maybe I could wrest the stubborn lingering life out of her. Maybe I could put her to rest. 

 

  But I wasn’t capable of anything so selfless. Instead I touched her arm, where the blue of her veins twined from the crook of her elbow. My fingers touched her skin, gentle in the way that a hunter is gentle with doe, in the last moments. When she finally looked at me, her eyes were glassy and there were bruiselike circles carved out beneath her eyes. I didn’t want to scare her away again. 

 

  “You shouldn’t have come after me.” she said thinly, a feverish edge to her voice. My hand was still curled viselike around her elbow. “You have to leave here, and don’t look back, don’t stop until you reach DC. You have to listen to me. I want you to live. I want you to breathe."

 

  “I’m not leaving you here,” I promised, feeling the desperation crawl up my throat. The wind had picked up, tearing at my coat, biting at the end of my nose. Spring should have been kinder. I could have blown away like these dead leaves on the road. “There has to be some other way."

 

  “Now is not the time for you to play the hero, Clarke,” she said bitterly, stepping closer to me, so close I could see the lack of shadows on her face. “I’m asking you to leave. So go. You know you’ve always been good at running."

 

  “This isn’t you,” I said, a great gale scratching at my eyes. Mist settled on my skin, tiny droplets clinging to the small hairs on my arm. I told myself I’d find a way out of this. “Lexa, please. Why are you doing this?"

 

  She shook her head, and up close I could see a small scar on her jaw. “It’s not me. There’s something . . . there’s something bigger than us and it’s holding me here. I can’t control it. If I go with you there will be nothing left of me, dust scattered everywhere and I won’t be myself and I won’t be dead, either. I think you could call it Hell. Neither of us wants that.”

 

  It didn’t seem fair. Nothing did, really, and I think I realized then that her skin was nothing but a reconstruction of people I’d known before. Lexa was not a thing that I could carry with me, a suitcase or a powder compact. Lexa was rooted to that house. I should have known. All that talk of ghost stories and yet I had always been the temporary one. The one who leaves first. 

 

  Wind roared in my ears and dead things skittered around my feet. The sky seemed no particular color, I could see it reflecting in her eyes and I could see myself in the irises of the girl I loved. In this reflection I was rendered softer. I’d want her to be mine in every lifetime in every place on every shore under every tree across every path leading to nowhere. 

 

  “Lexa?” I asked her, “I think I’m—"

 

  Death began with the screaming of tires on a rain-slick road. Here it was. A splintering of windshield glass as my head went through it. My lungs popped easier than a rubber balloon. Choking exhaust and gasoline spilling. Pain exploding through my body as my spine shattered and my skull split right down the middle. 

 

  At the end of this everything was still. After all this time, pain had forgotten my name.

 

\- - - - 

 

 

_ "I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I’ll be waiting for you there."  _

_ **-David Mitchell,** **Cloud Atlas** _

 

\- - - - 

  Here I lay. A castaway washed up on a shore of broken pavement. I stood on shaky legs and I walked away from the wreckage. If I had turned my head, I would have seen a girl. Greasy and crushed upon a stretcher. Blood matted in her candyfloss yellow hair that her mother had played with all those years ago. An ambulance was parked nearby. It’s lights played across my skin, red white, red white. If I had cared, I would have seen them zip up the body bag and drive her away. But my feet were bare and good for running. And so I left. 

 

  Here was warm mist so thick I could hardly see my own hands. I spun around, smiling at last, feeling my sundress swish around my thighs. The same dress I’d bought from Goodwill for three dollars, white and stained at the hem. I’d worn it to Finn’s funeral, the lone bright spot in the storm of black and gray. Here a great cloud of birds flew over, their wings rosy with the rising sun, their calls bittersweet. Doves, I think. I wondered if the birds were dead, too, or if they were just a manifestation of my mind. Making a spectacle of itself, as always. 

 

  Here the mailbox still hung crooked, but the gravel of our driveway no longer hurt to walk on. The fog had faded to nothing now, and the air was rich and smelled of lemon and laundry hung up to dry. Someone was calling for me. I looked up and I saw her shimmering there, not far away.

 

  Lexa sat glowing on the porch railing. With her long gangly legs hanging over the side, her dark windswept hair tumbling down in messy curls. My Lexa. She ran down the stairs and drew me into her arms, holding me to her like she’d never let go. Her lips on mine, kissing me senseless. Softer than before. My name like a confession on her lips. A whisper. 

 

  _Clarke, honey. Clarke, I knew you’d come back. Clarke, you were born to bring mountains crumbling down._

 

  She took my hands in hers. My scarred fingers intertwined with her slender ones, belonging in the way that only shadowless things can belong. Her ruddy lips curved up into a soft smile, grinning at my sense of wonder, and there was color in her cheeks. Lexa was looking at me like I was her first chance at a happy ending. Sunlight turned her eyes green and I knew summer would come soon.

 

  Here, I was forgiven. Here her hands were warm. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks again for reading this.
> 
> please comment below if you can, I love getting feedback and hearing what readers think <3
> 
>  
> 
> (also, my tumblr is @lexasghost.tumblr.com, feel free to take a look.)


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